Chapter 4 - The Ultimatum
The silence in the conference room was thick enough to suffocate a man.
Marcus sat frozen in his chair, staring at me as if I were a ghost. The charm, the confidence, the polished Wall Street swagger—all of it had evaporated, leaving behind a terrified twenty-four-year-old kid who had just realized his grand scheme had blown up in his face before it even left the launchpad.
"Look, Leo... let's not blow this out of proportion," Marcus began, his voice trembling slightly as he leaned forward, trying to dredge up a semblance of his old persuasive magic. He reached out, his hand hovering near the edge of the document. "My uncle... he's old-school. He insisted on putting those clauses in there. You know how lawyers are. They always plan for the worst-case scenario. We can cross those out. Right now. Grab a pen, cross out Section 4 and Section 8, and we'll initial it. We're partners, man. Brothers."
I looked at the red ballpoint pen in my hand. Then I looked at Marcus.
In my first life, if he had offered to cross those clauses out right then and there, I would have melted. I would have believed he made an honest mistake, thanked him for his flexibility, and signed my life away with a smile.
"Cross them out?" I asked quietly, tapping the pen against the cover of the portfolio. "Marcus, you didn't accidentally include a predatory recapitalization clause and an offshore IP-stripping shell company. You premeditated this. You spent weeks structuring an agreement designed to rob me blind the second the ink dried."
"That's a lie!" Marcus shouted, slamming his fist against the table again, his face flushing a furious, mottled red. "I'm trying to protect what we're building! If you don't trust me, then we have nothing to talk about! Walk out of here right now, Leo, and see how far your little code gets you without capital, without a network, and without me!"
It was the ultimate threat. The classic abuser's ultimatum: You are nothing without me.
In my past life, that threat would have paralyzed me with self-doubt. I would have panicked, apologized, and signed just to keep from losing my only friend and my only chance at success.
Today, it sounded like pathetic background noise.
"Okay," I said.
Marcus blinked, thrown completely off balance. "What?"
"I said okay," I repeated, standing up smoothly from my chair and picking up my laptop bag. I slung the strap over my shoulder and looked down at him with an expression of absolute, serene pity. "You're right, Marcus. If we don't trust each other, we shouldn't be partners. So I'll walk out of here right now."
Marcus’s eyes widened. He scrambled to his feet, panic flashing across his features. He had expected me to fold, to negotiate, to compromise. He hadn't expected me to call his bluff and walk away.
"Wait—Leo, hold on, don't be rash!" Marcus stammered, stepping around the table, his hands outstretched in a placating gesture. "We can renegotiate! We can call my uncle right now and have him redraft the whole thing by this afternoon!"
"No, Marcus, we can't," I said, walking toward the conference room door. I paused with my hand on the metal handle, turning back to look at him one last time. "And by the way, you might want to call your patent attorneys as soon as I leave."
Marcus frowned, his brow furrowing. "Why would I do that?"
"Because thirty minutes ago, before I walked into this building, I filed provisional patent applications for the core neural-routing architecture under my own name as sole inventor," I said, offering him a cold, brilliant smile. "And since the corporate entity AetherTech Inc. hasn't been legally incorporated yet—thanks to the fact that I haven't signed your little trap of an agreement—that intellectual property belongs one hundred percent to me."
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The color drained entirely from Marcus’s face. He stood frozen in the center of the room, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, realizing with horrific clarity that he had just lost a multi-million-dollar tech company before it even drew its first breath.
I pulled the door open, stepped out into the hallway, and let the heavy glass door click shut behind me.
